Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 206

Chapter 206

RIVERA

Klaus nodded. “Which gives her exactly what she needs to adapt Whatever she’s still planning–res still planning anything – becomes harder to find and harder to stop.”

I turned that over for a moment.

The light through the window had shifted while we were talking, the grey morning resolving itself something thin and pale, not quite sun. I watched it move across the garden and thought about the two weeks. The assembly. The failed attempt on Theo. The cleared site. The secondary location that had gone cold.

*She needed three targets,” I said. “That was the entire architecture of the ritual. Three verified curse breaker lineages.”

Roy looked up from his folder.

“Louis,” I said. “Theo Morrison, And Bianca.” I counted them off without quite meaning to, as though listing them made the arithmetic more visible. “She’s had two and a half years to plan the acquisition phase. Five years if you go back to what she did to Elena.” I stopped on that. I always stopped on that And where is she now? Theo is in Silver Moon with a security detail and a pack on alert. Louis is at school with a protective ward and three of Elijah’s people watching the perimeter.” I paused. “And Bianca is here.”

Klaus was watching me with an expression I recognized but couldn’t immediately name.

“Her plan didn’t work,” I said.

The room was quiet. Roy had set his pen down.

“The window closes in three days,” I continued. “She hasn’t acquired any of the three targets. She moved her primary location, which means she’s running, not advancing. If she were close to completing the ritual she would not be packing up sites and going quiet. She would be escalating.” I looked around the table. “She’s not escalating.”

Elijah turned his pen slowly between two fingers. “That’s one interpretation.”

“It’s the interpretation supported by the evidence,” I said. “Which Roy just told me is circumstantial and incomplete. All of it. If we had a strong picture of active operational momentum we’d be seeing something. Movement at her sites. Communication intercepts. Pressure on our own positions.” I spread a hand. “We have a cleared building seventeen kilometers out and a man at a desk doing administrative work.”

“She could be consolidating,” Roy said, carefully. Not arguing, exactly. Roy never argued exactly. He introduced alternative framings with the neutral precision of someone who took his responsibility seriously. “Moving from multiple sites to a single one. Reducing her footprint before a final push.

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“She could be,” I said. “Or she could be looking at the same arithmetic I’m looking at and recognizing that the ritual window closes in seventy–two hours and she doesn’t have what she needs.”

Klaus leaned back in his chair. He looked at the ceiling for a moment in the particular way that meant was deciding something about how to respond rather than what to think. He had already thought it.

“Voss has been running this operation for fifteen years,” he said finally. “She is patient. She is methodical. She has waited seven years between ritual windows before.” He brought his eyes back down to me. “I’m not disagreeing with your read. I’m saying that a woman who waited fifteen years to get here does not abandon the plan because the first acquisition attempt failed.”

“She might postpone,” I said. “Wait for the next window.”

“In which case we have seven years to find her,” Roy said, and I couldn’t tell from his tone whether that was meant to be reassuring or alarming.

“In which case we have seven years to find her,” I agreed. “Which is a better problem than the one we had three days ago.” I looked at Klaus. “We hold on Thorne. We keep eyes on him. We keep looking for Voss. But we do it without the urgency of a three–day window forcing us into bad decisions.” I paused. ” We were going to tip our hand on Thorne to gain forty–eight hours we may not even need. That’s a bad

trade.”

Klaus considered this for a moment that stretched longer than I expected. Then he nodded, once, the specific nod that meant he had reached the same conclusion through a different route.

“Alright,” he said. “We hold.”

Elijah made a note. Roy closed his folder with the quiet finality of someone updating the operational picture in his head.

The room had a different quality after that. Not relief exactly. More like the specific release of tension that comes when you’ve been holding a breath you didn’t know you were holding.

Klaus reached for his coffee cup, found it empty, and set it back down. Then he looked at me with a different quality of attention than he’d had for the past hour, and said, “How is Louis?”

1 had been waiting for him to ask. Klaus always asked eventually. He had been asking about Louis since Louis was three days old and Elena had still been alive to answer, and the habit had outlasted every other change between them.

“He’s upright,” I said. “He went to school this morning.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“He’s pale,” I said. “Less appetite than usual. He’s been tired in a way that’s different from his normal tired.” I turned my coffee cup slowly on the table. “Bianca says his system is depleted from the curse activation last week. That he needs rest and time and that trying to heal him when he’s in this state could destabilize rather than support.”

Klaus was quiet for a moment. “She said that.”

“Was he eaten today! Klaus asked

Breakfast Less than usual, but something”

at they were listening but had elected not to be

Yes. More than his normal amount, which is consistent with what Blanca described” I paused. “She said the fatigue would peak around now and then start to resolve.

Klaus picked up his empty coffee cup again and set it down again without drinking from it. He had a specific way of doing that when he was working up to something

ra” he said.

“She’s very good,” Klaus said. “Everything I’ve seen of her work with Louis confirms that. She understands his condition in ways that have taken her months to build and that nobody else has come close to replicating.” He paused. “And she has been under significant stress. The assembly. Everything with Silver Moon. The investigation.” Another pause, this one longer. “People under stress make errors they don’t make otherwise. Even very good people. Even people who know a patient deeply.”

You think she missed something”

“I think,” Klaus said carefully, “that a second set of eyes on Louis would not be a sign that you don’t trust her it would be standard medical practice. You bring in a second opinion when a patient isn’t improving on the expected timeline. That’s not a judgment about the first physician. It’s what you do.” Flocked at him for a moment. “You want me to take Louts to BloodMoon General without telling Bianca.” Twant you to have someone look at him,” Klaus said. “James Wright is good. You’ve worked with him

**Waveva assenger